The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness

by Graham Caveney

  For anyone who has been, is the parent of, or has ever met an adolescent boy, the problem here is obvious. The signs that an adolescent boy is being abused are those that mark him out as an adolescent boy. Truculent mood swings, an overwhelming sense of alienation, relentless self-absorption, wave after wave of disaffection and resentment: the problem of the ‘abused adolescent’ is that it can almost seem a tautology. The comedian Dylan Moran used to do a great riff on kids (‘They have all these charities like Children In Need! When did you last see a child who wasn’t in need?’) and something similar can be said about ‘difficult adolescents’: it’s part of the job description. When shrinks and doctors have asked what effect being abused has had on me, I want to (but never do) say that I haven’t lived a non-abused life to which I can compare it. It’s perfectly possible that I’d have been a self-loathing addict without the contributions made by Father Kevin’s cock. There are, after all, plenty of other reasons to become one – social mobility, being a single child, being an arsehole. My guess is that I wouldn’t have been, but there is no – can be no – proof. Adam Phillips wrote a wonderful book called Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. In it he muses on the ways in which the lives we live run in parallel to, or are accompanied by, the lives we feel we ought to or could have lived. He writes: ‘When we are not thinking, like the character in Randall Jarrell’s poem, that “The ways we miss our lives is life”, we are grieving or regretting or resenting our failure to be ourselves as we imagine we could be. We share our lives with the people we have failed to be.’ I do this all the time. I sentimentalize the alternative adolescence which was refused me, whilst also knowing that this story is nothing more than a sentimentalized home movie. I mourn for the mum and dad who didn’t have their son bring home his first date. I can hear the anticipation in their voices as they say hello to Carol/Sandra/Kate, can sense Kathleen’s joy as Janet/Louise/Linda asks if she needs a hand with the washing up. I get dewy-eyed over losing the virginity I didn’t have to the girl I didn’t lose it to. I miss the kids I didn’t have and imagine Jack and Kath missing their grandkids even more. My non-abused life is as real to me as my actual one, often more so. The years I didn’t spend teaching in an inner-city comp, going those extra miles for that one kid who had a passion for poetry, are some of the proudest moments I never had. The fact that they never happened only makes them all the more precious.

  I semi-joke to Julie that the abuse couldn’t have come at a worse time, as though my age was incidental to the attraction which I had for him. I say, If I’d have been a few years younger I wouldn’t have known what was happening. Which would have been better, made me less guilty, nothing I could have done.

  And then I say: Or I wish I’d been raped. That way it’s a straight-up case of wrong versus right. It was all those fucking hormones, the permanent hard-on which I had from fourteen to sixteen; it was them that caused the problems. I say, if you have to have sex with a teenage boy, at least wait until he is no longer a teenage boy. Or get him before he becomes one.

  I don’t mean either of those things, I can feel their dumbness the moment they come out of my mouth. Yet somehow they speak of a fracture I’ve never been able to comprehend, and it’s something like this. Was it me or simply my youth that gave the priest the hard-on? It’s a stupid question, isn’t it? How can I possibly separate out who I was from the age I was? I don’t believe that there is an essential Me to me, a little core of Caveney-ness with which I was born and which I’ve kept hermetically sealed in some hitherto undiscovered cavity of my Being. I realize that whatever sexual appeal I had for Herr Pater was derived from some not-so-subtle interplay of intellectual precocity and adolescent vulnerability. Yet still it nags, laps at my consciousness: was it me or my youth?

  My body and its drives are being both attacked and denied, my sense of self shattering like a cracked windscreen. There is the Catholic boy, the St Mary’s Grammar School Bum Boy. Then there is this other boy, a boy who is not friends with any of the others. And who watches things from the ceiling.

  Next

  ‘We don’t need no education . . .’

  Pink Floyd, ‘Another Brick in the Wall’

  My other teachers aren’t happy with me either. I have, I am told, ‘an attitude’; although precisely what kind of an attitude is never made clear. My school reports are now full of ‘fear that he is going off the rails’, of ‘seems distracted’ and ‘needs to concentrate’. Not, of course, the headmaster’s. The headmaster’s report is glowing, barely containing his excitement at my ability to engage and comprehend, to make connections. When one kid looks over my shoulder and sees what Father O’Neill has written, he snorts, ‘Whaddaya do? Suck his cock?’

  Mixed reports lead to the A-level discussion. A levels could mean university and university means a way out. Kathleen nearly cries when the word is mentioned. ‘University’; she moves forward to the edge of her seat, leaning into the full force of my future. Her boy and university! In the same sentence.

  It’ll cost them, but it’ll be worth it. Science is out, just look at those reports. But English, history, RE . . . It’s like Father O’Neill always says, those subjects are right up his street. He’s made for them.

  A levels mean two more years of being a student. And being a student, as my molester regularly points out, is what I am good at. A levels are at once remedy and poison, curse and cure.

  My teachers don’t know my secrets, but I know plenty of theirs. I pump Kevin for information, for the dirt on his fellow priests and lay teachers. They are part of my pay-off, along with the theatre trips and the swanky restaurants. I am his bratty nymphet (his himphet?), milking Father Father for the shiny candy that is school gossip. He tells me about Mr A’s marriage problems, Father B’s drink problem, the affair that nearly happened between Mrs C and Father D. He tells me that Father E can be sulky and slams doors, and that Mr F is lucky to still have a job. I am his confidant as well as his girlfriend, his student and his catamite. It’s a lot for a sixteen-year-old boy to be. Being a sixteen-year-old boy is a lot for a sixteen-year-old boy to be.

  Next

  ‘“I know the way you must feel about me,” she broke out, “. . . telling you such things . . .”’

  Edith Wharton, Summer

  In her office, me and Julie agree: memories of fifty-year-olds are not the most reliable. Memories of fifty-year-olds who have experienced sexual abuse are notoriously unreliable. Memories of fifty-year-olds who have used drugs and alcohol to drown their memories of sexual abuse require a new language of memory altogether.

  I say, Because I was abused, I became an addict.

  And

  Because I am an addict, I don’t trust my memory.

  She says, You’re remembering all the time. Not trusting your memory is a kind of memory.

  I say, It’s scrappy, bitty.

  She says, Then write scraps, write bits.

  Next

  ‘Do you know what she did, your cunting daughter?’

  Regan, in The Exorcist

  I still go to mass, but no longer take communion. The idea that I can take Christ’s body into my mouth appals me. In the build-up to my first communion, there had been a debate with Father Mac about whether we should receive the host into our hand or directly onto our tongues. It was agreed that our grubby mitts were no place to commune with the transubstantiated flesh of Our Lord Jesus Christ. We decided He should go directly into our mouths, like a Malteser. I remember trying not to bite into the Sacrament. Biting would, after all, be literally tearing into the flesh of Christ.

  I remember the host sticking to the roof of my mouth, its coating sucking up all my saliva, and being forced to dislodge it with the tip of my tongue. I remember thinking that Our Lord Jesus Christ had been spat on by the mob on his way to being crucified, and yet I couldn’t get enough spit up to dissolve his sacrificial body.

  This wasn’t that. The reason my sixteen-year-old soul was not able to take communion was not becaus
e I no longer believed in Christ, but because He was the only thing I believed in. Molestation had taught me many things, but of one thing I was certain: my mouth was not a holy place. To take His body when my own was so corrupt was a sacrilege so great that I could hardly think of it; so great I could think of nothing else. To not take communion would be my penance. I would stand amongst the congregation and let Him see me – let him see me also – not take communion.

  Next

  ‘By persistently remaining single a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation. Men should be more careful; this very celibacy leads weaker vessels astray.’

  Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

  He is taking the service. His sermon is about a rumour that a film is going to be made about the sex life of Jesus Christ. (Was this Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ? Really, so early? Or another, equally blasphemous Catholic?) He is quietly enraged, a state I’ve come to know by the way his lips purse up, as though he is about to blow a kiss. He does his riff about how he’d organized a trip to see Monty Python’s Life of Brian. I’d heard this riff before: it was one of his favourites, proof of his liberal tendencies, his sense of humour. (He was, after all, the Rev Kev.)

  But this, the sex life of Jesus, would be blasphemous in a way that he refused to countenance. He hoped that the Divinity of Christ was something that lived in our hearts even as it was being cheapened by the proposed makers of this proposed film.

  I am sitting in the third pew from the front whilst Kevin delivers this sermon. I have no doubt, then or now, of his sincerity. For him, the point of Christ would have been that He transcended sex. That is what made Him Christ. He may have suffered on the cross as a man but He was resurrected as the Son of God. A film that showed Christ having sex would not be a film about Christ. It would merely be a film about a man called Jesus.

  That the Catholic Church has some bizarre notions of sexuality is hardly news (although I have yet to encounter a non-bizarre notion of sexuality), but its insistence on the celibacy of its clergy is, perhaps, one of the strangest.

  In its defence one could say that the Church’s preoccupation with celibacy acknowledges the centrality of sex. Priests are not being asked to give up nothing. But suppose you saw your sexuality as a curse? What if celibacy is not a renunciation but a relief? It may be why some priests want to become priests, a way of relinquishing something you didn’t want in the first place. And the Catholic Church will reward you for it, allow you to build a career on this sacrifice which isn’t a sacrifice at all. Was that the Rev Kev’s logic, the seminary a way not to access his desires, but a way to frustrate them?

  I’ll soon be going to Crete. I go back to sleeping with the light on, as though I’m a young boy: a younger boy. I think: maybe the thing that I keep thinking is happening isn’t happening at all. You hear about women who think they’re married to some film star who they’ve never even met, or become convinced they’re pregnant with a rock star’s baby. Maybe I’m their altar-boy equivalent. And if I was mad, and all this stuff was in my head, how would I know? My head wouldn’t tell me if my head was mad: heads aren’t like that. Heads are the problem.

  Next

  ‘So many children want to please, try to do as they are told, imagine that what we are telling them we want is what we want. Wise children figure out that what we [adults] are after is the enticing naughtiness that comes from disobedience, their flight leaving open the child’s spot so that we can occupy it.’

  James Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting

  ‘It was entirely possible that one song could destroy your life,’ says the narrator of Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude: ‘Yes, musical doom could fall on a lone human form and crush it like a bug. The song, that song, was sent from somewhere else to find you, to pick the scab of your whole existence. The song was your personal shitty fate, manifest as a throb of pop floating out of radios everywhere.’

  For Dylan that song was ‘Play That Funky Music’, Wild Cherry’s disco-taunt to aspiring soul brothers everywhere. Four years and three thousand miles apart, there is a song that is picking at the scab of my existence, and it’s worse – far worse – than all that ‘dancing and singing and moving to the groovin’ ’endured by the invisible white boys of Brooklyn.

  ‘Young teacher, the subject of schoolgirl fantasy . . .’

  Now the epitome of earnest elevator-jazz, it may be difficult to remember that Sting was once thought of as an edgy urban poet (I know!).

  ‘She wants him, so badly, knows what she wants to be . . .’

  I’d seen The Police when they were the pretenders to punk’s reggae heart – a blistering two-hour gig at Blackburn’s St George’s Hall. But now, now Sting has decided that he is a serious artist addressing serious subjects.

  ‘Don’t stand, don’t stand, don’t stand so close to me . . .’

  It was the best-selling single in the UK in 1980 and, like Dylan and Wild Cherry, it felt like the song was ‘the soundtrack to your destruction’.

  Did I hate it then as much as I hate it now? I’ve just found the video on YouTube and it made my scrotum shrink. Sting can barely contain his own self-regard, it threatens to spill over like the biceps from his cap-sleeved T-shirt. Close-up on Sting in a classroom. He coyly looks over his Miss Moneypenny glasses, pretending to mark the girl’s homework. In case we miss the point, he’s wearing full gown and mortarboard. This is theatre and authority, everyone! This is a serious fantasy! The lyrics are delivered in a way that he thinks is brooding and husky, but which make him sound like he’s auditioning to be a sex-phone operator. ‘Book marking, she’s so close now . . .’ The bassline has the same stalkery feel, perving its way around the ankles of this girl who is ‘half his age’. Just when you are getting ready to call the police (and there are too many jokes there to settle on one), the song erupts into its eponymous chorus. Sting is joined by his fellow band members and they too are all decked out in university gowns and caps. Hurrah! Then they all start dancing, a kicking-a-football dance in which the three rogueish musicians get to show how wacky they are despite the fucking-a-schoolgirl thing.

  The Police weren’t alone in finding teacher–pupil fucking an enticing subject for pop music. The Boomtown Rats had made a record a few years earlier – ‘Mary of the 4th Form’. On the face of it Geldof’s contribution was just as offensive as Sting’s (‘She quickly drops her pencil / And slowly bends to get it / Teacher is a natural man / His hand moves out to touch her . . .’). Yet somehow a re-listening to ‘Mary . . .’ is nowhere as creepy as re-listening to ‘Don’t Stand . . .’. Maybe it’s because I prefer Geldof’s honest lechery to Sting’s arty pretensions. Maybe it’s because raising awareness of starvation in the developing world cuts you some retroactive slack when it comes to your back catalogue. Or maybe it’s because I wasn’t being serially molested to the sound of The Boomtown Rats, whereas Sting’s reign of paedo-kitsch coincided with it exactly.

  It was a horrible cosmic joke, an ‘Our Tune’ that was not my tune.

  I’m making a cheap shot at Sting because of one of those flukes of history (and besides, a man needs a hobby), but there is a larger issue at stake than a pompous pop song. In an article for the London Review of Books, Andrew O’Hagan wrote about how the whole ethos of seventies and eighties light entertainment was predicated upon an unacknowledged sexualization of people too young to cope. Writing about Savile and the BBC, he argues that in asking ‘How did he get away with it?’, we are asking the wrong question. What we need is to examine the complicity of our culture at large.

  We’re not allowed to say it. Because we love our tots. Or, should I say: WE LOVE OUR TOTS? We know we do because the Mirror tells us we do, but would you please get out of the way because you’re blocking my view of another 14-year-old crying her eyes out on The X-Factor as a bunch of adults shatter her dreams. Savile went to work in light entertainment and thrived there: of course he did, because those places were cu
stom-built for men who wanted to dandle dreaming kids on their knees. If you grew up during the ‘golden era of British television’, the 1970s, when light entertainment was tapping deep into the national unconscious, particularly the more perverted parts, you got used to grown-up men like Rod Hull clowning around on stage with a girl like Lena Zavaroni. You got used to Hughie Green holding the little girl’s hand and asking her if she wanted an ice-cream. Far from wanting an ice-cream, the little girl was starving herself to death while helpfully glazing over for the camera and throwing out her hands and singing ‘Mama, He’s Making Eyes At Me’. She was 13.

  If the weird sleaziness of light entertainment produced the Savile freak show, what then of its less legitimate relation, popular music? Here is an industry that has no need for a veneer of ‘wholesome family fun’. This is rock ’n’ roll; lock up your daughters. With a brief to reach into the collective sexual psyche of adolescence, the popular music industry has had over sixty years to ask what it means to be a teenager in love. And what it means to be in love with a teenager. Let’s leave Sting doing the hokey-cokey in his video-classroom, and listen to some of those golden oldies from yesteryear.